Part 12

What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened with the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into the geniality of Humor,--all his mirth lost of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane.

But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,--too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.

The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,--"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose macaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."

I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.

But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds which took up so readily with the theory of Hamlet's madness; all of them incapable of irony, therefore not competent to fly into his meaning; limited, like the dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the plain appearance. "Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him," says Osrick.

So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death with a presentiment which his soul was great enough to put aside, and also give him breath to say how great it was: "We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." No crotchet of real or assumed madness could lurk in the repose of such a man.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: One interpretation of this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the martyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the Arabic _Makbar_, pl. _Makabir_, place of interment.]

THE PORTER IN "MACBETH,"

THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT,"

THE FOOL IN "LEAR."

THE PORTER IN "MACBETH."

The vulgarity of the Porter's language, in the third scene of the second act, repelled Coleridge, who pronounced it to be an after-thought of some baser hand. "I dare pledge myself to demonstrate," said he, that it was an interpolation of the actors. Other critics have followed with the same feeling of condemnation. But only Shakspeare could have risen above such a conventional estimate, and have put this piece of solid consistency into that part of the tragedy which it strengthens: there it stays in the only place where Nature could have lent to it her justification. We can readily admit that the undisguised lechery of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida," and the brothel scenes in "Pericles," were subsequent additions to those plays by a pen that was accustomed to deal in broad effects without regard to the organic exaction of the other characters. Perhaps they were fragments of older plays left over by carelessness, or, what is much more likely, introduced as gags by the play-actors. But we can spare them out of the legacy of Shakspeare because they are not in the manner which he used when broadness served his purpose. When the gross details are hung over and fondled lewdly, recurred to morbidly, laid open with ingenious particularity till we detect the sickening odor of the dissecting-room which rises from slashed and naked subjects, we may determine at once that the scene preserves not one stroke of Shakspeare's pen. The lines seem suffocating in a close and tainted place. What a brisk draught ventilates the honest coarseness of the Porter! what a light, bantering touch hits off the vice which is needful to finish the portrait of Falstaff! Even Parolles, his prototype, only ventures far enough to make a scene coherent with Helena's unspoken thought.[8]

Let us see if Nature was not fortunate in finding the Porter at his post at an hour when he was needed as never before.

The air around the castle of Macbeth "nimbly and sweetly" recommended itself to Duncan's senses; and Banquo noticed that the swallow, most confiding and unsuspicious of birds, approves the place "by his lov'd mansionry." On every frieze, buttress, coigne of vantage, Nature had colonized this domestic wing, as if to hint to the wayfarer "a pleasant seat," peace and unviolated sleep within. But we remember that a raven had croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan into the castle. The swallows twittering in the delicate air cannot drown this omen of insecurity: as we enter with the unconscious Duncan, the weird sisters slip by us from their blasted heath, and the house darkens with a fated purpose.

It was an unruly night, and the owl clamored the livelong hours. Towards morning, after the accomplishment of the murder, Lady Macbeth snatched the bloody daggers from the hand of her husband to carry them back into the chamber. The air that was interrupted at the lips of the gracious Duncan seems breathless as he, appalled at the deed; and our consciousness of it sinks into an awful silence. Just then a knocking at the gate is heard.

De Quincey, in an essay "On the Knocking at the Gate," rightly notices that it reflects "back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and depth of solemnity," and he explains this effect. "When the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."

Admirable as this criticism is to justify the profound art of Shakspeare, it does not seem to me entirely to exhaust the effect produced by the knocking. It not only makes known to us that human life recurs, and thus emphasizes our sense of the unhuman world of murder, but it also startles us with the sudden consciousness that the human which thus recurs does it in entire ignorance of the scene at which it knocks. That makes us catch our breath, to feel how thoughtlessly life is about to stumble into the tremendous scene. What a contrast of innocent unconsciousness,--so innocent, so remote from the event, that we should think it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings upon itself did not prevail! We wonder who will first discover what has occurred, whether man or woman; somebody is doomed to blunder into the ghastliness of that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will be the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed around which the angels of honor and loyalty ought to have watched with spotless wings? Some one steps into this pool where all the safeguards and trusts of human life lie drenched. How will he manage to escape from it, and will the tongue be palsied "with the act of fear" to refuse to the lips words adequate to express the villainy? And yet this must be done.

We therefore become aware of this additional feeling, that the life which knocks at the gate, though unconscious, is pregnant with the design of an overruling Power; just for a moment, there seems to be the supernatural arrival of something with a commission to detect the murder. Every knock smites the bare heart of Macbeth, who may well exclaim, "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st!"

Shakspeare makes another world for Macbeth,--a sequestered hell. The knocking announces the existence and reappearance of another life, as De Quincey notices; but he does not note the fine prolongation of the Hell into the humorous fancy of the Porter who comes to open the gate.

To the old French taste, this Porter was one of the Shakspearean violations of decency and tragic sentiment,--a vulgar fellow who has been waked out of a drunken sleep, and who talks outrageous matter that is the farthest removed from murder, so that solemnity is affronted and abruptly leaves the hearts which it had just monopolized. But the more we dwell upon Shakspeare's characters, "the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement, where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident."

The Porter, as if he had been privy to the transactions of the night, translates each knock into a candidate for admission into his quaint fancy of a hell, of which he keeps the gate. Fleay, in his "Shakspeare's Manual," shows that the Porter makes allusions to contemporaneous circumstances of the year 1606, when "Macbeth" was first produced. "The expectation of plenty:" wheat, barley, and malt were extraordinarily cheap. The "equivocator" is the Jesuit, Garnet, who was tried for gunpowder treason in that year. "Stealing out of a French hose:" the fashion of hose became short in 1606; yet the tailors took the old measure of material and cabbaged the difference. So that the Porter belongs to that year, and could not have been subsequently interpolated.

"If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have often turning the key. Who's there?" "An equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, equivocator!" Yes, this is the very house for him to come to, where a treason has just been committed which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. "I'll devil-porter it no farther: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." If the outer life is to gain admission at all again to this castle, this grotesque hint of the hell within undoes the gate appropriately: by no abrupt transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human life is reached again. The Porter delays by his successive fancies, till we begin to grow impatient, like those emissaries of Heaven who shiver at the gate. This impatience, humorously created for us, introduces another human feeling to qualify our awe; and thus we rejoin our common humanity.

When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,--a very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked him." Then our feeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able to take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Macbeth's feigned unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon us with his horror. Moreover, the carousing which the Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's opportunity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, while we think how innocently drunk the whole household was to provide a human weakness for an act of death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived the stratagem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. An after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's traces; but he has performed his function by letting life and human nature in upon the sexless and monstrous scene, and may now vacate his post.

Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot be accepted by a taste that is more fastidious than the world itself is. But, if the world chooses to be vulgar, why needed Shakspeare to have imported this base touch of realism into his art? Only by the permission of Humor, and the justification of an exigency to drag our feelings back to life by the handiest strand, however coarse it may be. And after he had invented that thrilling moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot get along without the house-porter, who is the only one awake enough to let honest Nature in. So we must take him as he is, and admire the poet who did not send the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt.

The Agamemnon of Æschylus reaches a breathless moment of suspense, when Clytemnestra has left the scene to plan the murder of her husband, and the Chorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, expresses our expectation. All at once a stifled exclamation struggles out from the interior of the palace: the Chorus whispers, "Hush! who is it that cries out, 'A blow'?" and the play soon closes with the sombre feeling unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the spectators back to life, and to the other persons whose interests implicate them so deeply in the plot. There is but one interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy, and when that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted; the poet has no more to say, and is not conscious of any craving for variety in his listeners. His play was an artistic embodiment of the current religious ideas, and so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is, from manifold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor could intrude. The Chorus, listening to the blow, intervenes instead of a Porter. It is the voice of an audience conscious of the crime. So is a modern audience conscious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed through the silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus permitted to mingle in every awful occurrence, and therefore need to be restored again to the ordinary world of justice and emotion.

Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius when he meets this exigency which antique religion did not feel. He admits the free play of life into its real closeness with all our moral and pathetic emotions; but we never find that Humor weakens the religious purpose of the play, as it would if our private anguish were unseasonably interrupted by it, because our personal fortunes are not touched by the tragedy. We are implicated in the scene only by our instinct of observation and sympathy; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck us and became a "fee-grief due to each single breast," we could endure it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a temper that keeps all other strings muted but sorrow. So the Humor which we would not tolerate when the tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen within every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart is so keenly summoned by the mimic scene.

THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT."

The name of the Clown does not appear in the _dramatis personæ_, and only once in the text, Act ii. 4, where he is called Feste. All the dainty songs of the play are put into his mouth. Feste was the name of a distinguished musician and composer, probably a friend of Shakspeare. We may even surmise that he set to music one or more of his namesake's songs. There is no play which employs the element of music so frequently, or that speaks of it in the tender terms which only a lover of melody can use. It is admitted into the plot as a confidant and adviser, and allowed to sway the moods of the characters.

The Duke calls for Cesario (Viola) to repeat

"That piece of song, That old and antique song we heard last night."

The Duke has forgotten that Feste, and not Cesario, was the singer. Fleay overlooks this touch of nature, and attributes the passage to an older play or first draught, which appears uncorrected in the present play. But the Duke is mooning about in his sentimental fashion, and vaguely recollects that Cesario was presented to him as one that could sing "and speak to him in many sorts of music." He had done so, no doubt, so that the mistake was natural to the distraught mind of the Duke, who seems to allude to it when he says immediately to Cesario,--

"If ever thou shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me; For such as I am all true lovers are, Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, Save in the constant image of the creature That is belov'd."

His obliviousness is indeed so profound that he blunders in dismissing Feste when the song is over, saying to him, "Give me now leave to leave thee." This, so far from being an imperfect reading, is a perfect touch of his abstruse mood. It amuses Feste, who says aside, "Now the melancholy god protect thee," &c. Every line and word of this beautiful scene is unalterably well placed.

We see that the Clown adds a good voice to his other gifts; he does every thing "dexteriously," and is in high demand for his companionable spirits. For Sir Andrew and Sir Tobey his songs are blithe and free: all the ballads and ditties that had vogue in Feste's time are at his tongue's end, and he is always humming snatches of them. For the Duke he has cypress sentimentalism, urges death to come away, and forbids a flower sweet to be strown on the black coffin of the Duke's luxurious woe. We can imagine what a face Feste pulled over the minor key which so tickled the Duke, whose love was after all nothing but the spooning of a professor of rhetoric. He can take off his sighing disguise as quickly as Viola can transfer herself into woman's weeds. Olivia is well aware of this, and having just lost her brother is in no mood for a flirtation. She knows he is a noble and gracious person, but she has read the first chapter of his heart, and "it is heresy." The Clown, who is as usual Shakspeare's keenest and most amused observer, knows this well and puts it into the neatest language: "The tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal! I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything and their intent everywhere; for that's it that always makes a good voyage of nothing." And this turns out true enough; for the Duke with all sail set after Olivia, and a spanking breeze on his quarter, tacks nimbly in the teeth of it the moment Olivia is married by mistake, and Cesario becomes a woman. The only serious sentiment in the play is the one so tenderly concealed in the disguise of Viola.

In Act iii. 7, Viola enters, meeting Feste, who is playing the pipe and tabor. Her simplest remark he makes the pivot of a jest, and is never tired of tossing words. He plays with them as a juggler with balls; they all seem to be in the air at once. There never was such a jaunty and irrepressible quipster. Yet when Viola says to him, "I warrant thou art a merry fellow, and carest for nothing," his reply, "Not so, sir, I do care for something," betrays the serious temper which lies under all his fooling to furnish the appositeness of his remarks:--

"For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit; But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit."

Viola, who says this, might adapt a text of Paul, and apply it to Shakspeare's people,--"For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise."

Of all Shakspeare's clowns, he is the best endowed with a many-sided mirth, as indeed he should be to pass lightly through the mingled romance and roystering of the play and favor all its moods. The sentiment of the Duke is as inebriated as the revelling which Malvolio rebukes. Olivia's protracted grief for her brother is carefully cosseted by her, as if on purpose to give the Clown an opportunity.

CLO. Good madonna, why mournest thou?

OLIV. Good fool, for my brother's death.

CLO. I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIV. I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

CLO. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.--Take away the fool, gentlemen.

All the characters, noble and common, have some weakness which he intuitively rallies. The charm of the comedy lies in these unsubstantial moods of the chief personages which consort with the more substantial whims and appetites of the others. The only sobriety is vested in the Clown; for all his freaks have a consistent disposition. So the lovely poetry of the mock mourners alternates with the tipsy prose of the genuine fleshly fellows. Their hearty caterwauling penetrates to Olivia's fond seclusion, and breaks up her brooding. Feste is everywhere at home. When he plays the curate's part, Malvolio beseechingly cries, "Sir Topas, Sir Topas!" The Clown says aside, "Nay, I am for all waters,"--that is, for topaz, diamond, gems of the first water, all many-colored facets I'll reflect. And he does so in this conversation which he holds with Malvolio, who says, "I am no more mad than you are: make the trial of it in any constant question." Then Feste airs his learning: "What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?" and makes his question lead up to a sharp retort, when Malvolio answers, "That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird;" for then Feste says, "Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam." For it was a country notion that the woodcock was the foolishest of birds; so he translates Malvolio's grandam into one, and leaves him to inherit her absence of wits. And Malvolio was so devoured by mortification and anxiety that he does not notice when Feste cannot restrain his burlesquing knack, but makes the pretended curate say that Malvolio's cell "hath bay-windows, transparent as barricadoes, and the clearstores toward the south-north are as lustrous as ebony."